Somewhere between Earth and the moon, Reid Wiseman encountered a problem. The windows of his Artemis II spacecraft were filthy.
It wasn't a mechanical failure, the haunting bleep of a master alarm or some other unforeseen consequence borne out of attempting to travel further than any human beings in history. Instead, the four astronauts aboard NASA's Artemis II mission had spent so much time with their faces pressed against the glass, gazing in awe at both the diminishing Earth in one direction and the extraordinary lunar landscape growing bigger in the other, that the windows were covered in smudges.
"We were looking out at Earth and we were looking out at the moon all the time," Wiseman told ESPN. "Victor [Glover], my pilot, made a comment when we got into our first orbit of Earth, he's like, 'that's the last time Reid ever looked inside [the spacecraft].'
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"We had to do a photo analysis of the windows so that the geology team could make sure there was no damage, or if they were seeing blemishes on lunar photography, they could relay it back. And I was looking at the windows before I got the camera out to do the survey, and I called down to Mission Control and said, 'hey, first, I need to clean them, because the amount of grease marks from our noses and foreheads on the windows, it was just completely covered.'"
For the commander of the first crewed mission to the moon in more than half a century, it was an understandable distraction. The view was unlike anything he had experienced before, even during his previous six-month stint aboard the International Space Station.
"We're human. Making sure the spacecraft is operating is of the prime of importance. But right underneath that is absorbing the experience. The thing that struck me most looking at the Earth is it got very small, and then it got, like, that big," Wiseman said, pushing his thumb and index finger almost completely together.
"But really looking at the moon was the three-dimensionality of everything. You're not looking through an atmosphere. Everything is crystal clear, everything. The blacks, the craters, the bumps, the sun hitting the crater rim, it was profoundly crystal clear, and all four of us felt that exact same thing. Your brain was having trouble processing the clarity with which we were seeing this three-dimensional moon right there out of the window."
Spine-tingling stuff, even if here it was slightly off-topic, at least in an official capacity.
The premise of Wiseman's interview time with ESPN was not primarily about space. Although when you're talking to someone who has travelled a quarter of a million miles from Earth, how could it be about anything else?
Sitting at Austin's Circuit of the Americas, Wiseman was not wearing the orange spacesuit of Artemis II, nor the familiar dark blue of NASA, but the white of Mercedes' Formula 1 team's team kit. Six months after returning from his historic journey around the moon, Wiseman became an ambassador for the German manufacturer. Last year, he and his daughter had attended the United States Grand Prix on general admission tickets. Then, for all intents and purposes, Wiseman was just another person baking in the Texas sun with thousands of other people. Returning a year later he can boast that he's one of just nine living humans to have seen the far side of the moon with their own eyes.
The setting of the interview prompted an obvious question.
How does NASA compare to Formula 1? The answer was surprising.
"Oh, they crush us," he replied. "I mean, the level of engineering here, they smoke us."
Wiseman's view is rooted in the priorities of the two disciplines. NASA places a premium on proven technology and backup systems, even if that means carrying additional weight into space to ensure the mission objectives are met. Formula 1, meanwhile, is about the relentless pursuit of performance and pushing the boundaries of engineering in search of even the smallest advantage. As we spoke, we were surrounded by Mercedes' race operation -- engineers, mechanics, media team, performance coaches, who have impressed him as much as the technology.
"In spaceflight, what we really need is tried and true, redundancy, and we can accept a little bit of a mass penalty," he said. "Here, they're just pushing everything to the next level, and just every single thing is ... it's not just the cars, it's the humans. You know, everybody's walking around with WHOOP straps, and monitoring everything about themselves. They're all basically athletes. They're all going all in at all times. I love the way they deal with human performance and mechanical performance."
The competition aspect of Formula 1 -- which pits Mercedes against 10 other teams every race -- is always going to skew a comparison between Antonelli's world and Wiseman's world. For the Artemis II commander, it's the hunger to win that sets Formula 1 apart.
"At the end of the day in our work, there's a really large team of experts that sit just under the fanfare, but are the ones that are the true heroes that have the real courage. And then on top are these people who are willing to push the envelope a little bit and go.
"What is a little different for us is I have a crew of four people that are together in the spacecraft and working to try to make this mission the best it can be. In these cars, it is George [Russell] going all in, killer instinct ... Kimi [Antonelli] going all in, killer instinct. Occasionally they might meet in a corner and then I'm like, 'oh dear god, let's get through the corner.'"
For Mercedes, that focus on performance has seen the German team climb back to the pinnacle of the sport this year. Wiseman was speaking ahead of a U.S. Grand Prix which saw Kimi Antonelli move to the verge of becoming the sport's youngest-ever world champion at 20 years old.
This weekend, he will almost certainly wrap it up in Mexico City.
Wiseman can remember his interaction with Antonelli in 2024, before he had even started racing in Formula 1. Even then, Wiseman could see traits that have helped propel Antonelli to the brink of history.
"I met Kimi briefly when he was touring the Johnson Space Centre, and he invited me to a race when he was there," Wiseman said.
"[He was] 17. When I met him, the first thing I thought was how astonishingly humble and down to earth he was. But at the same time, he's a little goofy, which I love, but he's just curious about everything. We were touring with a few other drivers, but Kimi was asking every question about every single thing, whether he needed the information or not. Those are the people I try to latch on to because that curiosity is so powerful.
"You walk around, why is that cloud there? Why is that bird flying? How is it doing that? Why are these tyres better than these tyres?"
Antonelli's rise came after a rollercoaster rookie season in 2025. The young Italian has this year made a lot of the support network Mercedes put around him - team boss Toto Wolff's arm-over-the-shoulder approach to some of Antonelli's early mistakes were key. So has been the oversight of his race engineer, Peter Bonnington, who brought with him the experience of working in the same role with Lewis Hamilton.
Even here, Wiseman cannot help but point to where the two worlds overlap in some way.
"I chuckle at the way Bono and Kimi talk [on the radio]. It feels exactly like us in space, where we'll say something to the engineering team, and then when we unkey the mic, the engineering team will be like, 'they don't know what they're talking about', and then they'll come up with an answer for us, and they'll send it back. I love hearing that.
"I love it when the engineers and the drivers joke around on the radio, and you can just tell. It's just a great relationship."
Wiseman's link-up with Mercedes is a unique thing, but he feels right at home. He admits he was never one of those "crazy space kids" who could name every Apollo astronaut or had Neil Armstrong as a boyhood hero. But there was an interest in racing from a young age. He grew up going to NASCAR races with his father in Delaware, although they never did fulfill their dream of watching an Indy 500 together. His first chance to see Formula 1 in person was in 2023, invited by McLaren and Mercedes.
Wiseman admits he initially wondered what to expect from the "terrifying Toto Wolff," but has since come to admire the culture the Mercedes boss has established.
"What really struck me was, he's actually not scary, he's hilarious in his own humour. What I noticed as we were here, if you look around this place, there's no flash, it's just professionalism. 'We were going to go get the job done, and not just on the track.' It's the way they take care of the fans, the way they take care of the sponsors, the way they take care of the engineering team."
As he continued, Wiseman gestured over to Mercedes reserve driver Fred Vesti for another anecdote. "I went out for a run this morning with the engineers and did a swim down in Austin with them, and then I couldn't keep up on the way home, so I ran with Fred Vesti. He hung back and ran with me. The culture here always comes from the top. You can just tell Toto has one hell of a racing team that also knows how to take care of people."
Here is where he thinks NASA can learn a great deal from Formula 1's super-active team members. "Astronauts have to put a pretty good premium on our own health and physical conditioning, because we're going to be weightless, and our bones and our muscles are going to waste during the mission.
"So we put a big premium on that. We don't put as big of a premium on our support team and making sure they are at their highest level, and I think we can raise their level of expertise. They spend a lot of their days sitting in chairs, analysing data, and most of them would probably be upset if I said, let's go run three miles, but I think we can elevate the human performance, and we should really look at that. Because you look around in this team, everybody is fit, they're hungry, they're getting after it, and I think we can elevate the team [at NASA]."
Wiseman was brought to Mercedes to tell these kinds of stories. His role is to work with team partners, sponsors and guests to explain the overlap between the two worlds and, of course, to tell captivating stories about his own experiences. It's easy to see what he brings to the table. Had our interview not already overrun its 15-minute slot, it would have been easy to have kept going and going. "Toto likes the way I communicate," he said. "I think [guests] also like hearing stories of four humans that have gone further from Earth than anyone else. And I think there's just a lot of good storytelling and a sense of adventure that comes from that."
Inevitably, of course, our conversation drifted back to space.
Wiseman's anecdotes do not end with the stories he can tell verbally. At one point, he reached for his phone to show a picture with legendary Apollo-era flight director Gene Kranz, now 91, and Apollo 13 astronaut Fred Haise, taken earlier that week. Scattered through his camera roll were photographs he had taken himself of the moon from inside the spacecraft, through those smudged windows. Not a bad collection of snaps to have at your fingertips.
The Artemis II mission captivated a worldwide audience. In one of its most poignant moments, Wiseman's crewmates surprised him by naming a lunar crater in honour of his late wife, Carroll. But while millions of people followed their every move from Earth, the four astronauts were experiencing something rather different.
It is only since returning home that Wiseman has begun to appreciate just how much the mission meant to those watching.
"One thing that has been so rewarding is fame is not really that fun. I don't know how Kimi and George deal with that," he said. "But I was at an airport over in Europe the other day, and a dad came over to me and said, 'Hey, my daughter thinks you're Reid Wiseman. Are you?' And I said, yes, I am.
"And he turns to her, and this 10-year-old girl from the Philippines comes running over and just gave me the biggest hug. She knew everything about Christina, everything about Victor, everything about Jeremy.
"And I took this little medallion off my backpack and gave it to her, and she was so emotional. That stuff just is, it's all we could have ever wished for."
It was one of countless stories Wiseman and his crewmates have been hearing since they returned, providing a new perspective on a journey they are still coming to terms with themselves.
"We were all together three weeks ago. And we hadn't been together in a few weeks, and we were like, how's everything going? What are you feeling right now?
"And we all have this common feeling of we're starting to understand that we experienced this mission, but Earth experienced it. And now we're loving hearing the stories.
"Now that we've kind of processed the mission, we're listening to the stories from our friends at launch, when Carroll Crater was named, the amount of emotion that was involved in that. People were waking up and turning on the YouTube channel to see where are they today, what's going on.
"And we realised we went on a mission, but actually Earth kind of did too."